American actress and singer (1912-2001). She was born Lucille Wood Smith in Uvalde, Texas, but her name was changed to Frances Octavia Smith while still quite young.
She got married at the age of 14 to Thomas Frederick Fox, and she had her first child when she was only 15. She and Fox divorced when she was only 17. She moved to Memphis, Tennessee and got married again, this time to August Wayne Johns.
Hoping to make it big as a singer, she worked in an insurance company while taking as many jobs singing on the radio as she could. Her marriage to Johns was also unhappy, and they divorced in 1935. Next, she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she gained popularity as a singer on a local radio station. While in Kentucky, she took the stage name Dale Evans, from the middle name of her future husband, Robert Dale Butts, and the last name of actress Madge Evans.
Evans and Butts moved to Dallas, Texas, where she performed for a local radio show. After getting married, they moved up north to Chicago. Her performances in the Windy City got her a lot more attention from radio audiences and from film studio executives, who cast her in small roles in a number of Westerns. Her big breakthrough came in 1944, when she starred opposite Roy Rogers in "Cowboy and the Senorita." The two had a lot of onscreen charisma together, and Evans became Rogers' regular leading lady.
Rogers' wife, Arlene, died in 1946, and Evans and Butts divorced at about the same time. The two co-stars got married on December 31, 1947. Though they remained married and happy together until Rogers' death in 1998, Rogers and Evans had a tough time of it, losing three children while they were young. But their careers in the movies were almost unstoppable. They appeared in 30 movies together, including "Apache Rose", "Bells of Coronado", "Don't Fence Me In", "The Golden Stallion", "My Pal Trigger", "Out California Way", "Pals of the Golden West", "Roll on Texas Moon", "San Fernando Valley", "Song of Nevada", "South of Caliente", "Sunset in El Dorado", "Trigger, Jr.", "Twilight in the Sierras", and "The Yellow Rose of Texas". To millions of fans, Roy was the King of the Cowboys, and Dale was the Queen of the Cowgirls. Even their horses, Trigger and Buttermilk, enjoyed amazing popularity.
Roy and Dale appeared on television during the 1950s and '60s in "The Roy Rogers Show" and "The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show". Dale wrote Roy's theme song, "Happy Trails to You", as well as several inspirational and spiritual books, including the bestseller "Angel Unaware". And both of them received inductions into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1976.
Evans died of congestive heart failure in Apple Valley, California in 2001.
Research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) |
